| During the Victorian period, Benedict de Spinoza's philosophical treatise the Ethics (1677) was a contentious topic of discussion in English discourse, and this critical reception of the treatise extended into the period's novel. At issue were the Ethics' concepts of God and Nature, of cognition and emotion, of freedom and morals, and these ideas and the period's critique of them are manifested aesthetically in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) (NB: Eliot translated the Ethics), Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). These novels are unique in Victorian fiction in the fact that they engage with the Ethics' entire metaphysical, epistemological, psychological, and moral system and create through intertextual correspondences with it a Victorian model of tragedy. The novels adopt and utilize the Ethics' concept of passion, but they challenge and modify its concept of reason and thereby invest rationality with tragic potential. Through such "critical dialectic," the four texts develop concepts concerning thought, emotion, and moral obligation. These concepts show how "emotive bonds" connect characters and how the characters and their bonds form "emotive networks." In these networks, dangerous passions informed by incomplete but sometimes reasonable cognitions drive characters' actions, and some characters consequently experience "tragic sadness": an emotive decline culminating in catastrophe. The emotive networks integrate into the "Natural networks" of these novels' "monistic settings," settings that have about them senses of eternity and infinity and that provide unities not only of place but also of all existence. Characters have "Natural bonds" with non-human aspects of the settings, and these relationships underlie tragic experiences. A Victorian theory of tragedy consisting of six elements emerges from the discussion: tragic sadness, Naturalization of the supernatural, emotionalization and socialization of hamartia (i.e., tragic error in judgment), inequality of emotive bonds, tragic potential without free will, and the conflict between the rational and irrational. This Victorianization of the tragic art form furnishes new insights into the tragic models of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and naturalism. |
